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crimeandpunishment writes "A major international (retrospective) study into cell phones and cancer, which took 10 years and surveyed almost 13,000 people, is finally complete — and it's inconclusive. The lead researcher said, 'There are indications of a possible increase. We're not sure that it is correct. It could be due to bias, but the indications are sufficiently strong ... to be concerned.' The study, conducted by the World Health Organization and partially funded by the cellphone industry, looked at the possible link between cell phone use and two types of brain cancer. It will be published this week."

At least from this we know that cell phone radiation isn't causing some massive epidemic of brain cancer, and the affects, if there are any, are relatively small. That's not the biggest comfort you could have, but it's something (considering most of us are not going to give up our cell phones anyway).

The problem with "stress" is that it is hard to define. For some people, yes, cell phones could cause stress, for others such as me cell phones probably reduce stress by keeping me connected. If something major happens I'm easily notified via cell phone or can notify others. What causes stress for some people might not cause stress for others. For example I tend to get stressed out when things don't arrive quickly, mailed test scores for standardized tests used to stress me out much more than the test generally did because there was uncertainty and delayed consequences. So while some people might be stressed out because of constant access to information there are others who stress out a lot more because of lack of information.

How much difference does it actually make if you're the one using the cell phone vs being anywhere in the vicinity of a cell phone and tower? I'm not asking about cancer risk, because we've already seen those results were inconclusive, but I'm assuming we have some way to measure exposure to radiation. I would guess people who live closer to cell towers are exposed to more radiation than someone who is using a cell phone all day, but that could be a completely false assumption. If that guess is correct, how

You should probably consider the inverse-square law.Cell towers transmit at higher power than cell phones, but only a minuscule portion of that reaches even a person standing at the base of the tower. With a cell phone against your ear, about half of the transmitted rf energy is going through your skull.

It's difficult to be sure. The fact they could find neither a conclusive link nor disprove one indicates they missed something which is likely associated. While it's rather difficult prove a negative, you usually can do well enough.

My personal opinion is there's no direct link but since this is such a politicized issue people pretty much think what they want. The closest analogy I can think of is the vaccination/autism argument. The real

Perhaps you could come up with an example where there is no correlation, but there is causation?

I always wonder when I get these "challenges" whether someone really doesn't understand how statistics work, so they are wandering around in a constant state of confusion (or worse, confident ignorance). Or whether they are all pedantic asses who are too lazy and/or stupid to have an independent thought.

I can think of trillions of examples of a causation without correlation. I'll stick to something related to this topic. People who use cell phones have different habits than those without. Perhaps, because people aren't tethered to the desk phone, when they take calls at a desk, they push away or are more likely to walk around. If the CRT radiation has a greater effect than the cell phone radiation, then you'll find a result that correlates cell phone usage with lowered cancer, even though cell phones cause cancer.

The short answer is "confounds." They are everywhere, and you eliminate as many as possible in a study, but you never know what you missed, and you find what you can, publish what you find, and if anyone else identified a confound that wasn't accounted for, they can re-run the study with that in mind to see if it had any effect.

But, that you can't think of even one possible solution to the question you asked means you are too narrow minded or too stupid to worry about. I'm just posting this for those that have reasoning skills left. It's like all the people here, especially when I see people talking about voting and balloting systems, where if they can't think of a solution to a problem, then it's somehow proof that the solution doesn't exist.

Even if there were a high percentage of brain cancers from phone users, how would you tell the difference between cancer caused by RF wave, which has no theoretical basis or past proven medical experience/documentation, or cancer caused by weird plastics, weird dyes, lead paint, weird petrochemical outgassing from the plastic phones, which has a reasonable scientific biological basis for causing cancer, and unfortunately plenty of medical experience/documentation?

Are you talking about brain cancer from the plastics and dyes in a cell phone? (Lead paint doesn't cause cancer.) I think brain cancer caused by the RF radiation (which does have an unproven theoretical basis) has a stronger argument behind it than getting brain cancer from touching a cell phone.

Regardless, it's easy to differentiate between them -- that's why people came up with the clever idea of control groups.

Isn't this one of those things where you have to be talking on your phone for several hours a day for several years?
I use mine for an average of two calls a day, each lasting an average of 20 sec.
Or is it the latent emissions (eg polling the nearest tower) or the non-voice work (texts, emails, tweets, etc) that do it?

My phone's emissions when idle are for something on the order of a few seconds an hour. Non-voice work is also intermittent. And if the phone is 10 times further away from your brain, the received power at your brain is 100 times less.

I believe that if you make one short call a day, the energy your brain receives from that call will probably still be enough to make all the other network traffic negligible in comparison.

Well it sounded like they found some alarming correlation with some specific rare cancers. So like the other poster said, inconclusive is not the same as a negative result. I'm not sure why you are pretending that inconclusive somehow fits your ridiculous argument.

What you're saying is just not how statistics work. If the general population has a 1% chance of getting a specific type of cancer over 20 years, and a study found that people using cell phones seemed to have a 2% chance of getting cancer,

Actually, it kind of does. If you have a null hypothesis "there is no link between cellphone use and brain cancer" then an inconclusive result would fail to disprove the null hypothesis and therefore affirm it. This is based on choosing a null hypothesis that is based on the sensible default position, which in this study is fine as long as you're the kind of person who is willing/capable of understanding that we are constantly bathed in all sorts of EM radiation of which cellphones only play a small part

Sunlight has lots of other benefits as well, not the least of which is you're probably exercising instead of playing WoW all day.

Human skin synthesizes Vitamin D when exposed to the sun. Vitamin D is anti-cancer [sciencedaily.com], anti-rickets [wikipedia.org], anti-birth-defect, anti-flu (flu season takes place when the sun goes away for the winter), etc.

So basically, Vitamin-D is the Medical-Industrial Complex's worst enemy.

With that said, regular sunburns aren't good. It's usually best to stay out of the sun during the hottest parts of the day, approx. 12-2pm, and avoid sunscreen no matter what (which prevents the synthesis of Vitamin D).

This is the substance that can't be patented, is free for most of the year, cures cancer, prevents the flu, etc etc. Vitamin D single-handedly makes high-priced medicine as archaic as bloodletting and quicksilver.

This is the substance that can't be patented, is free for most of the year, cures cancer, prevents the flu, etc etc. Vitamin D single-handedly makes high-priced medicine as archaic as bloodletting and quicksilver.

What about the other 10 million things you can have go wrong with you which have nothing to do with Vitamin-D?

It's definatelly better to be outside. Some people take "in the sun" too far though... And I would guess Forest Rangers aren't one of those; at least the equivalent in my place has sensible clothing, given the place they usually work in (plus - often trees). But those specific places are generally damn healthy, too.

It shouldn't be too hard to reduce exposure to cancer-inducing cellphone radiation if any such radiation exists- it helps to know definitively so we can take action as needed. Given we already have measures to reduce the risk of getting cancer from sunlight (limit exposure, use sunscreen), we can safely move on to seeking out other means of getting cancer and dealing with them.

I would be very careful using the "why worry about X at all when Y is a bigger problem" argument. It is useful if you have to cho

You have a much higher likelihood of developing cancer from UV light than from microwaves.

Citation needed. You're saying it's silly to investigate the likelihood of cell phones or microwaves causing cancer because you're more likely to get it from the sun. What is that based off of? Gut feelings about the relative likelihood?

In science and especially health-related scientific questions, you test a hypothesis, you don't just assume. At some point someone thought the question of "could the sun's rays be causing cancer" was silly because obviously the sun, giver of all life, could not be causin

You have a much higher likelihood of developing cancer from UV light than from microwaves.

No problem, just cover your head with tin foil, and stop worrying about UV light causing brain cancer.

And if you replace top of your skull with a transparent glass dome, don't be a cheapskate like I was, invest in glass with proper certified UV filtering! I mean, what's the point of transparent dome if you have to cover it with tin foil when going outside...

The study says what nearly all other studies have said: we don't know.

No, it says that if there is an effect then it's so insignificant that we can't find any valid evidence for it. And I'm sure any effect that insignificant could be completely eliminated at minimal cost by wearing a tin-foil hat.

I have a problem with "medical surveys" in that they a prone to make correlation-causation errors. This seems to be a measurable problem that can be tested in the lab. Why don't people do this instead. Put a lab monkey next to an active mobile phone and keep them there for several years. After that, dissect the monkey for any signs of cancer. If there is, then alert the public. You then look into how it happened, i.e the biochemical interactions that caused it. Just "surveying" people introduces biases, other factors like diet and lifestyle and also crackpots.

Don't forget to put a "control" lab monkey next to a Chinese made kids toy.

Polymerized plastics are vaguely believed to be safe, unless they're the scare tactic of the month like plastics containing BPA. Partially unpolymerized monomers are vaguely dangerous. Some of the initiators / mold releases / dyes / lead paints used in the plastic industry are downright hazardous. Basically, if its plastic, and it smells when it's new out the of package, its probably dangerous to your health. The only question is

You still can. For a better accuracy, use a 1000 monkeys instead. And to make sure it is *only* the cell phones that could cause the cancer in the monkeys, build a highly controlled environment, and feed carefully controlled food that is guaranteed not to cause cancer.

Why don't people do this instead. Put a lab monkey next to an active mobile phone and keep them there for several years.

Are you crazy? Do you know how much the phone bill would be man???

After that, dissect the monkey for any signs of cancer.

Why? We have so many teenage girls permanently attached to their cellphones that it seems like a waste of a perfectly good monkey. Of course some of the dads might object if their angelic daughters were dissected, but hey you have to sacrifice for progress.

Surveys don't try to prove causation, only correlation. I'm not really even sure what a correlation-causation error is, actually. The problem lies in what people think they imply.

Still, you shouldn't discount a survey as a useful statistical tool. Especially for mapping trends over time. Most of what you dismiss as introduced biases is accounted for, and factored out. If you have ever read one of these types of studies they are careful to give results with various factors included as well as remov

> I have a problem with "medical surveys" in that they a prone to make correlation-causation errors.No they aren't. The people who conduct medical surveys such as this are invariably qualified epidemiologists who don't need to be told the difference between correlation and causation by some guy on slashdot.

Now, the media reporting of such surveys quite often conflates correlation and causation; see:

It's not that simple. You're ignoring statistics. You'd need a certain number of monkeys and some of them would have to be controls. If the effect is predicted to be small you may need thousands of monkeys. Animal rights groups would have a fit over this.

The monkeys would also have to experience the cellphone radiation in a similar way that humans would. The radiation would have to be emitted as if a cellphone were pressed up against their ear, and it would have to be intermittent as to simulate a human taking calls throughout the day.

Different cellphone systems run on different frequencies. If there was strong evidence to suggest that one caused cancer we couldn't necessarily assume that they all do, including future networks running on different frequencies. The same could be said about the power of the transmitter--different phones transmit at different levels of power, and future phones may be very different.

Some researchers believe that some cancers may take much longer than 10 years to show, so a thorough experiment may need to last 30 years or more. By the time good data is collected the cellphone networks would probably be using different frequencies and possibly lower power transmitters.

I'm sure there are other factors that I'm not even thinking about. Setting up a bulletproof experiment of this nature and getting solid results in a reasonable period of time is at least difficult and maybe impossible.

Both experimental and non-experimental studies are useful for this kind of thing. Neither is perfect, neither is useless. One of the great advantages of non-experimental studies here is that you can get enough data to estimate the size of a relatively subtle effect with enough accuracy to be useful, while taking into account numerous other potentially interacting factors. As a practical matter, you can't run a study of thousands of monkeys using cell phones, even if it were a good idea (which it isn't).

Have they done this study against other types of radio frequencies like cordless land-line phones? What about emergency services workers that carry radios on their hips until needed...are they being checked for hip-cancer? Doesn't Nike or some other shoe maker have a device that fits inside a shoe so people can listen to FM whilst jogging? Watch out for heel-cancer! The point being, why are cell-phones being singled out as possible culprits where then are so many other devices out there that use radio technology?

I think the media has way too much control over what is allowed to scare us into taking action. It seems that our efforts could be better directed toward something that actually makes sense. Let Mythbusters handle this type of shit.

I agree with the sentiment, but if we were to single out one thing, it makes sense for it to be cellphones. Cellphones emit radiation that has to be picked up miles away, so a large portion is going through you. Most of what you mentioned receive radiation from miles away, so you are being hit by only a fraction of the radiation the source emits. Cordless phones only have to transmit a few feet- maybe a few hundred at most, so they can be low-power compared to your cellphone. Two-way radios would be emitti

The article in USA Today has a nice little gem in it:
"The authors acknowledged possible inaccuracies in the survey from the fact that participants were asked to remember how much and on which ear they used their mobiles over the past decade. Results for some groups showed cellphone use actually appeared to lessen the risk of developing cancers, something the researchers described as "implausible.""
Now, I don't know why, but something about this statement seems kind of important.

What this statement, and the statements in the accompanying article mean is that the researchers clearly had a strong bias towards finding a positive result. It was quite clear that the authors don't understand what "inconclusive" means in this context.

There is a simple idea associated with this sort of study that wasn't mentioned at all - correlation does not imply causation. That is that even if a correlation WAS found it still doesn't imply that cell phone use causes brain cancer.

With these kinds of inaccuracies due to self-report, the question you need to ask is whether or not they're liable to introduce bias or just noise. In this case, I can imagine a source of bias (cancer patients may tend to recall more cell phone use than healthy people) contributing to the effect. Given the reported findings, this doesn't sound like a huge problem. Perhaps there are other reasons to suspect bias in the other direction, which would be more of an issue. But I haven't read the study yet (do

The article in USA Today has a nice little gem in it:"The authors acknowledged possible inaccuracies in the survey from the fact that participants were asked to remember how much and on which ear they used their mobiles over the past decade. Results for some groups showed cellphone use actually appeared to lessen the risk of developing cancers, something the researchers described as "implausible.""

Now, I don't know why, but something about this statement seems kind of important.

How can something like this be "implausible". Is it only implausible because they cannot explain it?

Sounds to me like they knew what they wanted the report to say before they began the study. All they wanted was sufficient proof before hitting the 'publish' button on the report. They never found it so it is labelled "inconclusive" which really means, "we shall try again".

To stop [cellphoneionizer.com] these [waveshield.com] buncha [safecell.net] creeps [emfblues.com] from making a pretty dollar. This one in particular cracked me up:

Our small, family business produces ceramic dielectric resonators which are individually made, by hand, with love and intention to absorb harmful emanations and rebroadcast the energy in neutral to beneficial ranges.

Charmion McKusick, Biomagnetic Research

(Good thing they rebroadcast bad waves into good waves, or they'd be violating some law)

To get statistical significance, you don't need to sample the entire population. Beyond a certain number for a certain confidence level, you don't get very much more.

Exactly right.

There was no statistical significance, which means that the cancers (or absence there of) were distributed over cell phone users and non-users (controls) with no preference for either group.

Normally this would be the end of it.

But by the way the reporter worded it (Inconclusive) and (to a lesser extent) the way the Researcher phrased it, indicates a clear predilection toward finding a positive correlation, which they could not do.

The takeaway is not that the study "inconclusive". The scientific takeaway is that there is yet again no evidence of correlation between cancer and cell usage.

Its over. The absence of evidence destroys this theory. Time to move on.

I don't care what they found or didn't found - I'm still not buying a god damned radiating device to hold up beside my head. I only have about two or three million grey cells left, and if there's a very very very very VERY small chance that the radiation might kill a couple hundred of them, IT ISN'T WORTH IT!!!

I'm not so sure. Cancer is a funny thing, and "cell-phone use" is kind of a broad behavior. I have seen so many items get shifted from the "causes cancer" to "inconclusive" to "completely safe" category and then back again, that I've got something of a jaundiced eye toward "moving on" based upon one study.

Even if you remove the obvious data-cooking by the industry, there actually were studies in the 50's that showed that the connection between cigarette smoking and cancer was "inconclusive". Better-designed studies, honest studies, showed later that the connection was real. We see this back and forth with dairy products and cancer in women, with certain chemicals in insecticide, with the ground water near industrial sites, with thalidomide. Sometimes it takes a whole bunch of studies before causal relationships are exposed. Sometimes, it takes a lawyer digging up studies done by the companies themselves and then supressed.

A few days ago, there was discussion here about h. pylori and ulcers. The first studies done by the Australian researchers came up inconclusive. Twenty years later, they got the Nobel Prize for later studies that proved the connection was there. Now, nobody has to suffer with ulcers any more, and ulcer surgeries are practically unknown.

No, you don't "move on" because of one study or maybe even ten studies. Science doesn't just drop an issue because of one researcher's findings. The reason this issue with the cell phones is even being looked at is because when you've got entire populations holding microwave transceivers next to their noodles day in and day out, you want to make sure it's really safe.

I'm not so sure. Cancer is a funny thing, and "cell-phone use" is kind of a broad behavior. I have seen so many items get shifted from the "causes cancer" to "inconclusive" to "completely safe" category and then back again, that I've got something of a jaundiced eye toward "moving on" based upon one study.

Even if you remove the obvious data-cooking by the industry, there actually were studies in the 50's that showed that the connection between cigarette smoking and cancer was "inconclusive". Better-designed studies, honest studies, showed later that the connection was real.

Yes, because this study was by the World Health Organization. They always do studies that favor Western and American corporations. Obviously a flawed study, nothing but a whitewash from the conspirators [who.int] at the WHO.

It seems silly to limit the study to 13,000 when the test pool is potentially in the millions.

Not really. Sampling can give accurate results even when sampling a small percentage of the total population. If U.S. political polls select a sample size of between a few hundred and a thousand out of 300 million with only 3% error, it sounds reasonable that 13,000 would be a good sample size of a population 20 times that, giving the same margin of error.

Also remember that, assuming the sample is chosen well (it is a good cross-section of the population and not confined to one specific subgroup), the benefits of adding additional samples drops off. It is essentially logarithmic: at first, adding samples is a huge benefit: after a certain point, the incremental gain from one additional sample is only a tiny fraction of the first samples.

If U.S. political polls select a sample size of between a few hundred and a thousand out of 300 million with only 3%..."

I'm not so sure those percentages are accurate. You'll often see different polls differ by much more than that (far more often than 5% of the time or whatever the confidence level is).

I have a suspicion that the math works out with a lot of "if a1 through aN are true, then..." and then no one going to the trouble of working out how likely each of those is to actually be true because they're hard to measure.

Certainly actual elections tend to fall well outside the +/- 3% accuracy claimed by many of the elect

If U.S. political polls select a sample size of between a few hundred and a thousand out of 300 million with only 3%..."

I'm not so sure those percentages are accurate.

They look accurate to me. From me undergrad stats classes, I seem to recall that to get 5% confidence level out of population of 10k, one needed a sample of around 850. For populations of 1000k, the sample size only went up by a few tens (perhaps to 900). Sampling is not linear, and it drops off the higher you go - IIRC (and I think I do), their is very little difference in the sample size for a population of 100k as there is for twenty times that number.

While people in large numbers are essentially predictable (and therefore boring, which is why statistics - for the most part - works), those theorems are strictly valid only for true random variables. As GP pointed out, the differences between different polls sometimes like far outside the error bounds set by the poll itself. Kinda makes the error bound meaningless since it has been repudiated by empirical means. As always, observations reign supreme and if there's a conflict with theory, it is usually a ca

I'm not so sure those percentages are accurate. You'll often see different polls differ by much more than that (far more often than 5% of the time or whatever the confidence level is).

Election polling is just especially difficult, since what counts is if you actually vote and who you vote for, neither of which have been determined at the time of the poll and could change. Election polling isn't simply an opinion poll, but is obviously supposed to reflect the population of people who will actually vote on election day. The polls have differing models of selecting "likely voters", and will thus have numbers that differ more than the margin of error for any single poll. In other words, taking the margin of error for a single poll and comparing it among multiple polls is invalid, since the differing polls used different means of sample selection.

Certainly actual elections tend to fall well outside the +/- 3% accuracy claimed by many of the election-day pollsters.

I guess I haven't found that to be true if you mean "tend to" is more than 50% of the time. Sure, you're going to find some that are outside of the 3% error bars, but you'd also expect that to happen, statistically speaking.

The principle is correct, but you're failing to take into account the probability of an the respective events. Given that winning 60% of the vote is considered a landslide, you can think of asking someone whether they're voting Republican or Democrat as a coin flip with a small bias in one way or the other. Because the race is so close, a few extra republicans or democrats in your sample won't produce a huge error in your estimate.

On the other hand, a brain tumor can be thought of as a rare event. If the true incidence rate of brain cancer is five occurrences per thousand people over ten years, and your sample of 1,000 people has six incidences, you have a sample error of 20%. It's because of this that a small variation in the numbers can produce a large error. Therefore if you want to accurately assess the rate of cancer, you need a much bigger sample size.

Absolutely, the sample size is inversely relative to how close the differential result is to the 'noise floor'.

In this respect, your first example is slightly flawed. As the expected determinant gets closer to the noise floor (ie. if the margin for a Republican or Democrat victory is going to be 0.01%, or 50.01% vs 49.99%), then a much greater sample size is needed to maintain confidence in the resultant prediction.

As you say, 60% is a landslide. So if that is the expected result, then a few percent error e

Consider a simple binary choice question. This is easily modelled by the binomial distribution which has well understood distributions. (Other distrbutions may be relevant but the principles remain pretty constant across them all.) The standard deviation is given by sqrt[np(1-p)] where n is the sample size and p is the probability of the observation you are interested in (the mean is np so in what follows I will be dividing by n to talk about percentages if you are taking notes). For example, are you male? If the true p is, say, 75% then you need a sample size of approximately 833 to get a 95% confidence interval (2 s.d.) of +/- 3%.

You might also note that the closer the true p is to 50%, the larger the sample size needed. If the true p is 50% you need a sample size of approximately 1100 for the same confidence interval. Furthermore, if you want to get it within 1%, the sample size goes up dramatically - to 10,000.

The population size is pretty much irrelevant. The population matters for ensuring that your sampling is truly random, but political pollsters can use the same sample sizes in Australia (pop ~20 million) as in the US (pop ~300 million) for similar accuracy. (Sampling bias is the reason that political polls can be out by so much - if you call households during work hours you are going to get a very different sample of people than if you call at dinner time.)

It really seems silly when, in America at least, age-adjusted rates of brain cancer have fallen or held steady since the 1990s. From the National Cancer Institute [cancer.gov]:

From 1990 to 2002, the overall age-adjusted incidence rates for brain cancer decreased slightly; from 7.0 cases to 6.4 cases for every 100,000 persons in the United States. The mortality rate from 1990 to 2002 also decreased slightly; from 4.9 deaths to 4.4 for every 100,000 persons in the United States. The incidence and mortality rates for cancers that originate in the brain and central nervous system have remained relatively unchanged in the last decade.

It would seem to me that falling cancer rates are no reason for assuming that widespread cellphone use has been a health concern.

I'm confused by your last statement. Are you saying that falling cancer rates do not let cellphone use off the hook for other health concerns? It seems that your quote from the NCI does exactly that as far as cancer is concerned (no more or less cancer with or without cellphone use would imply a lack of correlation there). Sure, that doesn't mean it couldn't raise other health concerns. For instance, I'd be worried about a faster approach to senility considering the mindless babbling on cellphones you get t

It could still be a general drop in cancer rates, but a specific rise in the rates for people who use cellphones (in certain conditions, given that pretty much everyone uses them these days?). Looking at simple numbers like that is inconclusive

The uncertainty in the study is due to the low precision of their data- they asked people to try and remember how much they were typically using their cellphones. Surveying more people isn't going to get people to provide more precise data.

Also, unless the needed data is already available somewhere, gathering more data costs more money. As someone else mentioned in a sibling post, there are diminishing returns when increasing your sample size. Eventually the cost of the data will exceed the benefit to the certainty of your results.

And a extremely-high-powered radiation source (>1000x that of cell phones, with incredibly high intensity) aimed right at their faces: THE SUN! THE FUCKING SUN!;)Oh, and outside there were at least a 1000 cars driving around.

Why in the world would they ask someone if they felt ill effects from their cell phone? They probably asked how much a person uses their phone, if they use a hands free device and what medical conditions they have among a host of other questions. They dont go around surveying what a bunch of laymen think are the causes of diseases.

Seriously, what the hell kind of comment is that? How does this idiocy get modded up?

"The study received 19.2 million euros ($24.4 million) in funding, around 5.5 million euros of which came from industry sources. It analysed data from interviews with 2,708 people with a type of brain cancer called glioma and 2,409 with another type called meningioma, plus around 7,500 people with no cancer.

DNA doesn't break until you get into the UV-light range of electromagnetic waves, cell phone frequencies are orders of magnitude away from being able to do it....but don't let the pesky facts get in the way of anecdotes and scaremongering.